Our contributors, from across our quarterly print issues and our website, read as widely and wildly as they write. Here, they tell us about the books that moved them most in the final year of this decade. 

2019 closes with the news that the President’s son killed an endangered sheep this summer. The dull son once again erased in the dark what was majestic and rare. The sheep was an argali sheep. His horns and gentle face resembled the shape of the female reproductive system. These sheep are killed for their horns. The dull son also killed a red deer. I don’t pray, but all year I’ve been carrying around Vi Khi Nao’s Sheep Machine in much the same way my great aunt Rosa carries around the Tehillim (the Book of Psalms). Sheep Machine is a two minute and fifty-two second frame by frame of sheep grazing on a mountainside, but really it’s a spell against apathy and greed. Almost each second is a page, and each page is a poem, and each poem is a story, and each story is a pasture, and each pasture is a hunger, and each hunger is a sheep. Vi Khi Nao has invented a new form that stills the tick before the tock flies like a bullet through the air.

This year my favorite books have been the ones that collect around rogue forms. Motherish forms with the belly of a story and the eyes of a poem. Hybrids that swell then go frail, grow wooly, and then grow smooth. Forms that leave the door open for dry leaves and ghosts and a sheep so lost she has forgotten what a sheep even looks like. Kate Zambreno’s Screen Tests, Brenda Shaughnessy’s The Octopus Museum, Tina Chang’s Hybrida, Anne Boyer’s The Undying, and Rachel Zucker’s Sound Machine all completely reimagine what it means to be a book with an earthly shape. Each one is a miracle. They are my fantasy coven. I have no doubt each could draw down the moon. —Sabrina Orah Mark

As I see it, the most important reading now and for the foreseeable (or unforeseeable) future falls into three categories. First would be books that continue to inform us with all the hard facts about how the earth is physically changing, year by year, under the effects of climate change, and for this, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming by David Wallace-Wells was important to me, alarming but also surprisingly engaging, a page-turner despite its hosts of statistics. The second category would be something philosophical or spiritual, with a longer view, to give us a little guidance as we reorient our thinking going forward. For this, I sometimes turn to one of the Zen books I have on hand, or sometimes a poem, perhaps one by William Bronk, who is able to embrace death in so many ways, or by the Norwegian imagist Olav Hauge. The third category would include some relief in the form of a good piece of fiction—for me, it is often something from earlier times, such as The Odd Women by the nineteenth-century feminist George Gissing or any of Elizabeth Taylor’s novels (somewhere in the neighborhood of Barbara Pym, she writes with a dependably high level of psychological insight and stylistic skill), but also more recent fiction, such as Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend. Yet one more category might be that of community relationships: how to work toward a harmonious coexistence with others, especially how, amicably, to cross the divide of political difference. Is this wishful thinking? Maybe, but it is also, I think, imminent necessity. One fascinating discussion that includes a meditation on forgiveness is Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past. —Lydia Davis

I recognize great storytelling any time I have to momentarily put aside what I’m reading to ask myself, How am I going to steal this? Or simply to say, Wow. It’s the feeling that signals I’ve come across an idea, or a mode of presentation for an idea, that I hadn’t seen before. Kimberly King Parsons’s Black Light brought wow after wow, along with eruptions of guilty laughter, as I encountered her startlingly fresh characters’ shockingly grim, yet palpably human thoughts and actions. That anything could surprise in 2019 is impressive, but Parsons’ surprises pay off doubly because she pulls from the dark recesses of our minds the ugliness we’d prefer not to see in ourselves. The joy is in the shared recognition, in the sense that you’re as fucked up as I am. By contrast, Dariel Suarez’s atmospheric debut collection A Kind of Solitude presents a cast of characters who must navigate impossibly grim conditions through ingenuity, resilience, and stoicism during Cuba’s “Special Period.” Here, it is often the source of the conflict—the system—that seems deranged, exemplified best, perhaps, in “The Inquest,” in which protagonist Elena might lose everything because her refrigerator houses a wheel of contraband cheese. Suarez masterfully collides the personal and the political, moving characters and circumstance toward each other like pieces on a chessboard. Finally, Dana Johnson’s collection Break Any Woman Down (2001, I know) is one I returned to again and again throughout 2019, especially for “Three Ladies Sipping Tea in a Persian Garden,” which baffles and delights me for its nearly conflict-free plenitude and its warm depiction of friendship. —Jonathan Escoffery

Part travel narrative, part lyric memoir, Sanmao’s Stories of the Sahara was a huge best seller when it was first published in Chinese in 1976, and has retained an enthusiastic following in the Chinese-speaking world ever since. This year, the first mainstream English edition of the book was published, bringing it an even wider readership. Sanmao’s enduring popularity across Asia stems partially from the fascination with who she was: a dashing, instinctive, often quixotic figure who seemed far ahead of her time in the way she saw the world and her place in it. Arranged as a series of short essays, the book appears at first glance to be a straightforward record of her move from Taiwan to the Sahara, where she lived with her Spanish husband, José María Quero, but almost immediately, it opens up to reveal a hypnotic meditation on love and loneliness in a foreign place. Writing with frankness and vulnerability, Sanmao’s constant questioning of her insecurities and flaws is remarkably human, and nothing remains beyond the boundaries of her probing eye, not least her relationship with José. Mike Fu’s gorgeous translation brings to life Sanmao’s evocative descriptions of the Sahrawi communities in which she lived, along with her wit and her gift for capturing life’s absurdities. Stories of the Sahara is a record of one person’s fierce refusal to follow a path laid down for her by the rest of the world, but it is also a celebration of the complexities of being an outsider, and, ultimately, an ode to freedom. —Tash Aw

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